 |
|
Page: 
|
 Somewhere in America today an old friend of mine is hanging a low-NOX gas/oil burner on the side of this steam boiler. This burner weighs 3,600 pounds and is the size of a Buick. It produces screaming air currents that sound like a banshee, but no one seems to mind because it’s in a very noisy place. Sometime this week this burner will belch flame into a boiler that will produce 35,000,000 BTUH of steam at 100 psig. Big enough for you?Once he’s done, the steam will travel about 150 feet to a PRV station, which will reduce the pressure to 15 psig. From there, it will travel a bit further to some shell-and-tube heat exchangers that will convert the latent heat to 180-degree water so that they can heat some buildings with baseboard radiators. There is no need for high-pressure steam anywhere else in this facility. The boiler is there because it was specified by someone who wanted it there. Make sense so far? I didn’t think so either. My friend is, of course, getting paid big bucks to hang that Buick of a burner. The other boiler has the same burner. It’s a bit older, but the same size. Why, you wonder, is there another boiler? Redundancy.
You’re wondering what they do here? Well, they treat sewage. They gather it from great pipes, separate this from that, collect the Essence of Poop, compress it into tight little briquettes and set it afire in an incinerator that is as big as your imagination. They use natural gas to get things going, and once begun, the process is self-perpetuating as long as there is a ready supply of poop. Which there always is, we being a well-fed people.
|
My friend didn’t plan any of this. He just marvels at it all, as do I. He does what he’s told and he gets paid and that’s good enough for him. If they ask him to hang a burner that is bigger than the Fourth of July, then that’s what he’s going to do. He’s a contractor, not an engineer.| Dan Holohan - [Intro] | [Email] | [Website] |
| The views expressed in this article are those of the individual author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the management or staff of MasterPlumbers.com |
